Two decisions get made in that meeting, and only one of them gets made well.

The first is whether the tool does the job. The second is whether the price, the term and the licence count are right for what you actually use. Your IT lead is well placed for the first. Nobody in the room is accountable for the second.

So the renewal becomes a fit conversation. Does the team still use it. Has anything broken. Are we happy with it. Everyone answers honestly, the answer is yes, and the invoice goes through.

Notice what never got asked. What volume are we actually buying. What is the uplift on last year, and what justifies it. What would a credible alternative quote us. Those are the questions your business already puts to every other recurring supplier it takes seriously.

Here is what that is doing to the price.

A supplier who only ever faces a fit question learns that fit is the only test. So they price to it. Not aggressively, and not dishonestly. Just to what the test allows. That is rational. Nobody on your side has been given the job of making it harder.

The fix does not require you to develop a view on software. It requires you to split the question. Put every renewal above your own materiality line through the same commercial review you run on any other category. Volume, term, uplift, alternative. Leave the fit call where it sits.

Budget season is when next year's software base gets locked in, so this is the month it is worth settling.

The question worth taking into your next leadership meeting: at our last software renewal, did anyone ask what it should cost, or only whether we still wanted it?

The quarterly report tells you what happened.

Your legacy tells you what mattered.

They are not the same. You know they are not the same. You still spend most of your energy on the first one.

The savings number on last year's board pack is that same problem wearing a different suit.

It was real on the day you reported it. You ran the tender. You held the line on price. Somebody in the room said well done, and the quarter looked handled.

Nothing about that was wrong. Tenders take months. Suppliers were squeezed. Contracts were signed. Every instinct in a well-run finance function says this is closed.

Here is the part that gets missed.

A tender has an end date. A celebration. A number to report.

The erosion that follows has none of those things. No ceremony. No line in the management accounts that tells you the month last cycle's savings stopped being real.

So the signature stops feeling like a starting gun and starts feeling like a finish line.

It is the other way around.

The day the contract is signed is the day the leak begins.

Volumes drift up. A site manager finds a vendor he prefers and quietly starts using them again. The supplier who sharpened the pencil to win the work lets the rate float back, one invoice at a time.

None of it is dramatic.

That is exactly why nobody raises it.

Three controls hold the line, and every one of them is boring. Contract compliance: is what we agreed what we are actually being charged. Demand discipline: did volume creep back up. Consolidation governance: did a department quietly re-add a supplier we rationalised.

Most mid-market finance functions run none of the three.

The CFOs who leave a cost base behind them are the ones who stopped reporting savings events and started running a savings engine.

The build is small. One named person, monthly, with last cycle's signed rates on one side of the desk and this month's invoices on the other. Not a project. A standing rhythm.

A tender is an event you put in a board pack. An engine is a rhythm you have to own.